DFM: Hold 'Til Cold

A Dispatch from Microhell

Dispatches From Microhell are episodic tales. They come from a small layer of hell designed as a defunct office building. They observe the horrors of abuse, forced complicity and the unknown forces that compel us.

---

Dispatch: Hold ‘Til Cold

Rishabh Dhiman

The steel rod started to heat up within Michael’s grip. Tolerable, for now. Frustration was already flaring within him. This place fed on his quick anger. The dispatch from the clerk had read:

Hold ‘til cold

Michael cursed, it echoed off the empty walls of the large office room. Stained and fallen partitions from the cubicles of some by-gone century weren’t enough padding to subdue his exclamation. Corded phones, faded pictures, cracked computer monitors, all haunted the dim space. One fluorescent blinked intermittently across the room, the last one to offer any light. Michael stood in the flickering shadow next to a rod like a fireman’s sliding pole, bolted to the floor and rising through the ceiling into the interminable dark of some other story.

Using his free hand he pulled the dispatch parchment from his beige slacks. The paper was old and heavy. It fell open easily. Still, the only words of instruction were “Hold ‘til cold”. Michael looked around the room, for anything else. The pole continued to raise in temperature slowly. Sweat began to slick his hand and on the back of his head. Cubicles in various states of disrepair, nothing to hold but gray felt. Ancient phones, some sat in their rockers, others were laying beside it or even hanging from the edges of their desks. Nothing.

When his fingertips began to sear, he knew the pole was the only option. In this hell, something always had to hurt. Doubt. Shame. Fear. The fact that the pain was so straightforward was suspect. His gaze scoured the floor, looking for other options.

Office chairs, tossed, up-ended, in pieces. Books and folders of various age and design. The room was littered with the evidence of some old culture. Michael had been on several dispatches before, he couldn’t recall if it had been a dozen or a hundred. Time was broken here, or maybe memory. Every room he could recall had been sterile, well-lit, clean. This room was filled with dingy debris, as if it had been abandoned in a rush and isolated for a century.

The pole was hot enough now to cause a burning ache in Michael’s deep nerves. Noting this, he slid his burning hand slightly up. It worked. The unbearable heat became uncomfortable warmness. It continued to climb where he held it. Michael looked up into the pitch black hole in the ceiling that the pole’s upper limits disappeared into. As warmth became pain, he inched his hand upward again.

The mental aspect dawned on him. He was either going to have to burn or climb into the unknown. He inched up another segment of the pole. Quite warm. He stuffed the parchment back into his slacks and grasped the pole with both hands. His right hand clasped on in a lower part of the steel and it was still burning. He quickly jerked the hand away, it was red and pulsing.

Michael leapt onto the pole, grabbing a higher spot with his right hand than his left, which he dared not remove from the pole for even a second. Since the dispatch was vague, but concise.

“Hold until cold.” He said aloud.

The echo wasn’t focused solely on this room. He had assumed as much before, but now Michael was painfully aware of the void above him. Whatever was up there caused his words to ricochet, as if it were entirely empty or hollow. Michael noticed where his feet were wrapped around the lower portion of the pole the leather had started to bubble.

“How hot is that?!” He screamed. The void repeated.

With a sudden feverish panic, he began to climb the fireman’s pole in earnest. The pattern of cooling remained consistent. By the time he was a couple of feet closer to the ceiling, there was no more pain from the heat. He waited, looking directly up. A cracking sound emanated from that upper abyss, the echoing quality resounded it, causing it to crawl around his heart. Another sound, a thump. He couldn’t discern if the crack had caused something to fall, or if the second sound had been a footstep.

“Is someone there?!” He yelled up into the dark space.

Nothing answered, but his voice played back over and over. A chill ran down his spine as his brain concocted the idea that not all of the echoes had been his voice. One might have been a mocking whisper. He couldn’t tell, the memory was distorted by fear. The rim of the hole ate at the dim light, offering only horrifying imaginings and distorted figments.

“I hate this place.” He whimpered quietly to himself.

An echo resounded, or a whisper. Michael considered letting himself fall back to the floor. He could just live in an abandoned cubicle. He recalled the stories of failed dispatches that he’d been told. Dorms of a dozen became less than three. Minds were robbed of sharpness and memories from life. Eternity as a laboring husk.

He looked up one more time, building his courage. He assured himself it would be an empty room with an open door, allowing him to complete this awful scenario. Something shifted in the dark. Black against black, tar swirling within oil. His left hand started to burn.

“I hate this place.” Something whispered in a far off corner. Echoes pushed its tiny voice to him.

Michael’s grip loosened on the pole. His throat became slick with bile and he recalled all the times in life he had rushed head first into danger that ended up taking more than he could afford to lose. He was half-daring himself to fall the few feet back into the room below. He looked down, re-estimating the distance. To his dismay, he noticed the pole and its bolts on the far floor were glowing with exceptional heat. Smoke began to emit from the bolt plate’s edges. The cheap rough carpet absorbed the fumes as it began to release its own. Within the moment of Michael’s noticing, small flames reached out at the meeting point of glowing steel and felt fibers. Michael started to slide from his loosened grip, losing nearly a foot of progress. The pain was immediate and severe. He tightly grasped the pole again and moved back into position with his head above the room’s ceiling.

Flames erupted from below as the fire spread, fueled by discarded papers and manila folders. With a great sigh, Michael assented to his fate and began climbing fully into the shadows. The pole grew cooler. As his waist passed the divide between rooms, he heard another thump. Then another. He continued to climb into the dark, his last moment of reasonable vision as he ascended allowed him to see a small puff of visible air.

Michael’s feet ascended the pole fully into the pitch dark room. He felt a small gust. He wasn’t sure if it was from a vent or if something had just rushed past him. He gingerly reached a foot out, away from the pole, seeking the floor. As he tapped at the edge of the barely lit circle he had climbed through, he expected a solid floor. There was nothing to touch.

Turning around with some effort, Michael wrapped his leg around the pole again and reached out with his other foot, nothing there either. Another gust, he was sure this one was something running by him. A terrible recollection played through his memory. A power outage in a strange house, being violently tossed into a room that locked from the outside. Bad drugs, worse people.

Michael grit his teeth, more furious at the puzzle of his situation than fearful now. He climbed the pole with a disregard for caution. The climb was difficult. His hands were clammy and faltered in his tired state. A few feet higher and his joints were screaming. Michael looked down to the bottom of the pole, more than twenty feet away now, the fire had spread to cover everything he could see below. His pants were tugged at. His mind split between it being against the pole or some nefarious shadow creature, torturing him before some climactic assault.

The pain was secondary now, if not tertiary. The ambient temperature became cool, and after a few more hops up, chill. Something grabbed his shoe right off of his foot. The adrenaline that caused lit up his shoulders and chest with new painful fervor and he managed another few feet.

Chill became cold. He couldn’t be sure, but he assumed he had exited that dark second floor and entered another, based on blind estimations. His socked foot slipped, the weight against his tired arms caused him to lose some of his height. He felt the wind of something swiping at his foot against the thin cloth of the sock. He gripped more tightly and forced himself upward. Cold became freezing. With another push of effort, Michael slammed his head against solid ceiling.

At the moment of impact, a small light appeared in the crawl space he now occupied. He was in a squat four foot area, just above the ceiling of the pitch black room. There was a duct that ran the length of the area, a panel on its side was hanging halfway off, big enough for him to enter.

Michael hopped off of the pole and landed on the flimsy bare wood panels of the crawl space. He gave himself a minute to catch his breath and to address the agony in his shoulders.

“I hate this place.” Whispered from the room below.

With a mighty groan, he rolled over and approached the duct. He ripped the loose panel off furiously and peered inside. It was lit with small circular LED fixtures. He climbed in carefully and began crawling. After a mere five minutes, a missing panel beneath him revealed an open, well lit hallway. He dropped without questioning it. Michael hit the familiar linoleum floors of Hell’s hallways. The building was set-up like an abandoned office or hospital, but the rooms and halls were constantly shifting. It was a comfort after the ordeal. A final memory assaulted him. He was middle-aged, leaving the warmth of a home for the cold dark streets. He had been sure leaving was freedom, but it had been the end instead.

With a new limp from the fall, Michael started to progress down the hallway. It didn’t matter which direction he went in, Hell had a way of finding you.